Henry P. H. Bromwell was an exhaustingly ambitious individual. He is best known for his Masonic tome Restorations of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry, published posthumously in 1905, but he also wrote an extensive amount of poetry, addresses, orations, and essays — both Masonic and political — and he even created his own Masonic rite, Free and Accepted Architect. Yet one curious byline that gets a mention on his Wikipedia page that appears to have gotten absolutely no attention is that he ran a newspaper called Age of Steam. Here I will endeavor to provide the greatest amount of information on this newspaper as is known.
According to Bromwell's daughter, Henrietta, her father purchased the Fayette Yeoman sometime after 1850.[1] This was a local newspaper in Bromwell's town of residence, Vandalia, Illinois. It appears he simply acquired their printing press to start a new newspaper, however Henrietta implies that he procured the entire entity of the Fayette Yeoman and simply changed its name, thus also implying he acquired its subscribers list and its files, et al. She explains the start of this newspaper differently in her entry on her father in her publication of the Bromwell family genealogy, namely that The Age of Steam was his father's, her grandfather's newspaper and Henry P. H. Bromwell assisted him with this newspaper.[2] The most detailed description of how this newspaper came to be is described by Henrietta in the preface to her transcription of the 1852 list of subscribers to The Age of Steam, in which she details its history based on what she knew about the paper. I will thus transcribe her preface to the subscriber list, as the only copy of this document is in the Denver Public Library, and not exactly readily available:
In the year 1852, Vandalia, the old State Capital of the twenties and thirties, always conservative, very much afraid of change, had not ceased to argue of the destruction of business to be expected from the coming of the rail roads, human life was also considered to be in jeopardy.
Engines were feared more than we now dread the air ships. A rival paper, in a nearby town, came out with a sneer at the title of "The Age of Steam", so that my father, in his next issue (to the delight of his friends) raised the name to "The Age of Steam and Fire", which title the paper bore, until in 1856 he sold it to Tevis Greathouse.
I have copies this list of subscribers to Vol. 1, from two small record books in the beautiful handwriting of my grandfather Henry Broughton Bromwell, who, in 1854 assisted in re-organizing Temperance Lodge No. 16, in Vandalia, masonry having lapsed when the Capital was removed to Springfield.
He was the first Secretary of this reorganized body of Masons, and Dr McCurdy was Worshipful Master. His handwriting can probably be seen in the old records of the Lodge. He was a Baltimorean, a Quaker by birth, and of fine education, but so quiet and unselfish, that other usually appropriated his honors.
He managed the paper a good deal, doing all the clerical work, but most of the editorials were by his son my father, who had always a brilliant wit, and with whom many persons were wise enough to avoid a tilt.
Greathouse sold the paper, and with it went the Files. At last, on the night of March 4th, one year after Lincoln took his seat as President, the office with all its contents was burned. Its patriot owners being away in the war, nothing was saved.
If any copies of "The Age of Steam" exist, they must be in the treasure chests of some of these old subscribers in the list I have copied.
I hope they may come to light, and that I may some time see them, for every move is as good as a fire, and we have moved several times, and I have none of my own.
Elizabeth Henrietta Bromwell
646 Williams Parkway, Denver Colorado.
September 25th 1927 [3]
So here we can see that the paper was originally called The Age of Steam and that it would change name to Age of Steam & Fire, because a another newspaper nearby bore a title that mocked The Age of Steam, and so Bromwell responded by adding & Fire to the title. Again, Henrietta implies that it was her grandfather's newspaper and that her father simply helped out with it. It was definitely a short-lived paper, that it must have gone inactive for a number of years, and eventually was totally destroyed by a fire, and because she and her father moved from Illinois to Colorado, even moved a couple of times to different houses in Denver, any copies her father may have kept were lost.
Henrietta, as valuable as her descriptions about the newspaper are, she clearly does not know a lot about it, so she constantly has to piece bits of information about it together years later, and none of her descriptions are consistent. We still do not know much about it. She transcribes the list of subscribers in hopes someone kept the papers, but we live in the modern age, and libraries are much more connected. Three libraries today have the 1852 volume of The Age of Steam, and two have the 1853 volume of The Age of Steam & Fire, and a few other libraries have a few copies of various issues of these in miscellaneous collections of Illinois newspapers. At this time, I have not found a full collection, and interlibrary loan has not let me view microfilms of any full collections. I will have to travel to Illinois and visit a few libraries to potentially examine any full collections. What I have been able to examine is one collection of miscellaneous Illinois newspapers on microfilm, which includes a few copies of the Fayette Yeoman, The Age of Steam, and The Age of Steam & Fire (reel no. 327 from the University of Illinois at Urbana Campaign — this reel was largely composed of newspapers from Fayette County, especially Vandalia). I was actually the first person to ever view this microfilm reel, as the seal was still on the reel, hence why I am certain almost no one has ever really explored this newspaper. This is what I can gather from the few specimens of these papers from this microfilm reel.
The Fayette Yeoman ran until at the latest May 10, 1851 (Vol. 2, No. 29), in which James Kennaday was the sole editor and proprietor. It would appear that Kennaday was the primary driver behind changing the name of the paper sometime in 1852. The only specimens I could view of The Age of Steam was April 30, 1853 (Vol. 1, No. 48), in which Kennaday and Henry P. H. Bromwell were joint editors and proprietors, and it was published weekly on Saturdays. It is possible that Henry Broughton Bromwell worked with the paper in 1852, and possibly even in 1853, but he is not mentioned in connection with this paper in either of the two issues of this paper that I was able to view. Henry Broughton appears to have only been a cleric, not an editor, as Henrietta indicates on the title page of her transcript. Sometime between May 7, 1853 (Vol. 1 No. 49) and August 16, 1853, the paper added & Fire to its name. As of the latter date (Vol. 2 No. 4), Bromwell became the sole editor and proprietor of the paper, and it changed its weekly publication day to Tuesdays. The three issues of The Age of Steam & Fire I was able to examine were the one already mentioned, along with August 23, 1853 (Vol. 2, No. 5) and September 6, 1853 (Vol. 2 No. 6). I find no records that this newspaper ran past 1853. As Henrietta indicates, the paper was sold to Tevis Greathouse in 1856, but I did not see any newspapers on the microfilm collection I viewed in which Tevis Greathouse was the editor or proprietor of. So I am not certain he did anything with the paper or press after his acquisition of it.
Note, I have not seen any specimens of The Age of Steam in 1852, so it is possible Henry Broughton was connected to the paper then, and possibly this is why he only kept records for 1852, and then he severed his connection with the paper when his son, Henry P. H., took over the paper entirely in 1853. Further, note that this paper went through an actual name change in 1853, as it maintained the same volume and issue numbers when & Fire was added to the paper's name, continuing the volume and issue numbers of its previous name. The front page title would be updated, but on subsequent pages maintained to read "The Age of Steam," indicating Bromwell did not want to pay to update this custom header.
Obviously my research on this paper is incomplete. Some day in the future I will be able to afford to travel to Illinois to view full collections in person, of whatever copies they actually have preserved.
But from what we can discern about this paper is that it was indeed originally the Fayette Yeoman, which was run by James Kennaday, but he would rebrand it as The Age of Steam sometime between mid-1851 to early 1852, with Bromwell joining the team, and by August 1853 Bromwell would acquire the entirety of the paper and added & Fire to its name as a responsive sneer at another paper. Bromwell neglected the paper in the years after 1853 and sold it in 1856.
Let's be real, this is not unusual for Bromwell. He was highly ambitious, and as a result, he neglected ambitious projects he started, and then lost interest in them, or just did not have the energy to maintain them. I write about this extensively in my article on him and the failure of his rite of Free and Accepted Architects in Philalethes (Vol. 74, No. 3, pp. 144-154, 173).
The paper's contents seem to us today as archaic and insignificant; mostly news about the railroad, land deals, new companies, et cetera. The reality is that it was actually a really progressive tabloid. Somewhere I read it being described as an "abolitionist" paper. Certainly Bromwell was an abolitionist, but I don't think I would call it that. He was certainly a radical. When he served as a Representative to Illinois in the US House, he was what we would come to call a "Radical Republican." I have read his political speeches in the Congressional Globe, and he was a hard radical in Reconstruction, frequently waiving the proverbial "red shirt" (i.e. citing the Union dead from the Civil War, or invoking the death of Lincoln), and calling for harsh punishments for the rebelling States before their representatives be readmitted into Congress, and such.
Further note that Illinois was still viewed as the frontier of the time. Bromwell reminiscences on the days when Illinois was the frontier back when he was a boy, sometimes in political speeches or elsewhere. Henrietta is correct in that Illinois was still very conservative in those days, and with the events of Bleeding Kansas and the approaching Civil War, tensions were high in Vandalia. An intellectual like Bromwell with abolitionist sentiments, as well as women's suffrage and technological advancements, it should not surprise anyone that his old press would be burned in 1861. Such indicates that Greathouse probably continued publishing tabloids, but I am uncertain which, but they must have been of a progressive leaning nature.
I would hope that once I can view some more complete collections of this paper we may have a better idea of who Bromwell was in these years. Perhaps we may find poetry of his that were only published in this paper and were lost by time his daughter publishes all his poetry posthumously. Perhaps we'll find some interesting editorials that illustrate key aspects of his character and sentiments. But at this time, I simply wanted to layout everything I know about this newspaper, as it appears it has never received a treatment whatsoever.
Notes:
[1] Bromwell, H. P. H. "Lines," On Buena Vista's Field, introductory remark by Henrietta Bromwell. 1918. Pg. 27.
[2] Bromwell, Henrietta. The Bromwell Genealogy. 1910. Pg. 52.
[3] Bromwell, Henrietta. "Preface," The Age of Steam: Subscribers List, Vandalia, Illinois, 1852. Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, G977.3 R737h.
